Growing Information:  Growing and harvesting seedless watermelons is one part science and one part artistry and skill.  You see, growing watermelons without seeds takes a bit of skill and investment.   Of course, Richard is always up to a good challenge and figured out how to grow them many years ago!  For starters, seedless watermelon seeds are quite expensive—go figure!  Thus, we do everything we can to ensure we get a high germination rate when we plant them in the greenhouse.  One of the keys to good germination is consistent heat at a temperature of about 90°F.  We preheat the trays for 24 hours before we plant the seeds and then carefully monitor the heat on the greenhouse tables until the seeds have germinated.  Once the transplants are ready to go to the field, we plant them on reflective plastic mulch for both heat gain, but also to help deter cucumber beetles and other pests that may introduce disease to the plant.  Speaking of pests, we aren’t the only ones who enjoy a sweet, tasty watermelon.  If word gets out that the watermelons are ready, the critters may start to move in.  Raccoons are the most common, but we’ve also seen turkeys, and crows.  We watch carefully and some years we put up an electrical fence around the field to deter the critters.

One of the tricky things about seedless watermelons is pollinating the blossoms as the plants are sterile.  The way we deal with this is to plant a different variety amongst the seedless plants that will provide pollen.  We actually use a ratio of one pollinator plant for every three seedless plants.  The pollinator variety may be a seeded melon, or there are specific “pollinator” varieties that do a very good job of providing pollen to the seedless plants.  Since we only grow small watermelon varieties, we are limited on the seeded varieties available to us for use as a pollinator.  We’ve also found that many of these varieties are very brittle and split easily.  Historically we’ve used the varieties whose specific purpose is pollination.  The downside of these varieties is they produce inedible melons.  This year one of our seed companies offered a new pollinator variety that was described as having edible, small melons.  We gave it a try and have found they are some of the best tasting watermelons!  They do have seeds in them, but they are micro seeds.  Watermelon seeds are actually edible and these micro seeds are small enough that we’ve found they are just fine to eat.  You can pick them out if you wish, but it really isn’t necessary.  Now that we’re harvesting both the seedless and pollinator watermelons, our harvests are significantly higher than in past years!

When it’s time to pick, we face another challenge and this is where a lot of the skill and expertise comes into play.  Richard is in the field nearly every time the crew picks watermelons, working with them to continue to hone their picking skills.  The crew is also carefully selected and only those who have been carefully trained are on the ground doing the picking.  There are several signs the pickers look for to guide them in making the decision to pick or leave the watermelon to further ripen.  The first thing they look for is three dry tendrils on the vine where the stem is attached.  There should be one at the stem and then one coming off the vine in each direction.  As long as the vine is healthy and free of disease, this is a good indication of ripeness.  When the fines start to die back or if there’s any disease on the vines, this can cause the tendrils to dry down prematurely making this a difficult indicator of ripeness. The second thing they do is pick up the watermelon and look for a yellow bottom.  If the watermelon has remained in the same place since it’s birth, it will develop a yellow bottom in the area where it rests on the ground.  If the watermelon has been moved for any reason (such as when weeding), it may not develop that color change and we can’t use that as an indication of ripeness.  The third indicator they look for is the sound of “The Thump.”  As the melon matures the thump goes from a high pitched “Ping” to the lower note of “Dohm.”  It takes a trained ear, and a quiet field, to listen for these subtle changes in sound.  As you can see, picking watermelons is no easy task!  Our pickers do the best they can to make quick decisions in the field and we think they do a pretty good job! Of course it would be much easier if we could look inside each one, but that’s not an option.

Additional Fun Facts: Though they look quite tough, watermelons have to be hand harvested.